Unlike Perl, you can't to my knowledge match a regular expression inside an if statement in Python and assign the result to a varaible at the same moment. This leads to typical constructs like this:

match = re.search(REGEX, STRING)
if match:
    # do something

So far, so Python. But what if I want to iterate through a file / array of lines, check each line for a few regexes, and fire a catch-all when none has matched? I can't think my way around a rather unwieldy and deeply nested if-else-if-else...-construction:

import re
strings = ["abc zzz", "y", "#comment"]
for s in strings:
    match = re.search("(\S+) (\S+)", s)
    if match:
        print "Multiword: %s+%s" % (match.group(1), match.group(2))
    else:
        match = re.match("y$", s)
        if match:
            print "Positive"
        else:
            match = re.match("n$", s)
            if match:
                print "Negative"
            else:
                # a few more matches possible in real life script,
                # and then the last catch-all:
                print "No match found, line skipped"

Isn't there any way to put this in a much nicer looking elif-construction or something? The following doesn't work in Python, because if-clauses take only expressions, not statements. However, something along these lines would strike me as pythonic, or am I blind to something obvious here?

if match = re.search(" ", s):
    print "Multiword: %s+%s" % (match.group(1), match.group(2))
elif match = re.match("y$", s):
    print "Positive"
else:
    print "No match found, line skipped"

Unlike Perl, you can't to my knowledge match a regular expression inside an if statement in Python and assign the result to a variable at the same moment. This leads to typical constructs like this:

match = re.search(REGEX, STRING)
if match:
    # do something

So far, so Python. But what if I want to iterate through a file / array of lines, check each line for a few regexes, and fire a catch-all when none has matched? I can't think my way around a rather unwieldy and deeply nested if-else-if-else...-construction:

import re
strings = ["abc zzz", "y", "#comment"]
for s in strings:
    match = re.search("(\S+) (\S+)", s)
    if match:
        print "Multiword: %s+%s" % (match.group(1), match.group(2))
    else:
        match = re.match("y$", s)
        if match:
            print "Positive"
        else:
            match = re.match("n$", s)
            if match:
                print "Negative"
            else:
                # a few more matches possible in real life script,
                # and then the last catch-all:
                print "No match found, line skipped"

Isn't there any way to put this in a much nicer looking elif-construction or something? The following doesn't work in Python, because if-clauses take only expressions, not statements. However, something along these lines would strike me as pythonic, or am I blind to something obvious here?

if match = re.search(" ", s):
    print "Multiword: %s+%s" % (match.group(1), match.group(2))
elif match = re.match("y$", s):
    print "Positive"
else:
    print "No match found, line skipped"